Life > March 20, 2008

By Caitlin Brooks | staff writer

On March 5 and 6, the campus community came together to celebrate vaginas.

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Graduate student Shelly Graves directed Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues in celebration of V-Day 2008, the 10th anniversary of the global movement to stop violence against women and girls.

The university’s production was one of thousands of performances in college campuses across the nation and around the world. “We were worried about vaginas,” graduate student Kate Yeske and seniors Samantha Spaeth and Whitney Marshall said, as they laid out a brief history of The Vagina Monologues.

The result of more than 200 telling interviews, Ensler created the Monologues to begin to write a ‘‘context’’ in which all women could indentify

The tones of the monologues varied – some of the monologues were funny, several depressingly serious, a couple were more than a little suggestive – but each one addressed the same issue.

The sexuality of women is a dark, unexplored area.

Vaginas need attending to. The show started off on a relatively upbeat note with such monologues as the self-explanatory, “Hair,” performed by junior Kristen Gentry and “The Vulva Club,” performed by senior Emily White, in which a women comes into her sexuality by discovering the name of her vagina.

Sophomore Kelly Bernhardt performed a surprisingly poignant and charmingly funny rendition of “The Flood” in which she told the story of an old woman who had not had a sexual experience in her life, save one fatal incident fifty years ago.

As the tale of her ‘‘down there’’ unfolded in a very upright accent, the audience first laughed at the flood that came from ‘‘down there’’ and then was carried along with her shame until at last, like Bernhardt’s character, at the end of the monologue, they felt a little better too.

The greatest line of the entire show came at the end of a short interjection called “Vagina Happy Fact.” Senior Whitney Marshall perkily informed the crowd that the clitoris is the only body part designed explicitly for pleasure and that it contains twice as many nerves as the penis.

As Ensler put it, “Who needs a handgun when you’ve got a semi-automatic?”

The audience went to intermission with a heavy weight after “The Memory of Her Face,” a monologue dedicated to female victims in Islamabad, Baghdad and Juarez.

The piece detailed eye-witness accounts of horrendous crimes committed against women.

Senior Kelly Chauvin described the ‘‘collateral damage’’ of the war in Iraq as a woman is disowned by her father after her face is severely disfigured by a stray bomb.

Junior Erin Robinson detailed the horrors of escalating abuse, culminating in an acid splash against a wife in Islamabad and senior Amber Chapel lamented the tragic reality of kidnapping, rape and murder in Juarez.

In the second half of the show, “My Short Skirt” and “My Angry Vagina” championed the feminist cause by rebelling against the perceived male chauvinist society and helped to raise the morale of the audience.

Graduate student Heather Knupp berated men who take provocative dress as in invitation for sexual harassment and senior Johanna Young made sure everyone knew that her vagina was angry because of harsh societal restraints and insensitive hygienic practices.

Senior Abigail Cline was a standout in the moving monologue “My Vagina Was My Village,” written about rape camp survivors from the former Yugoslavia. In a few short minutes, Cline described the atrocities of rape as an instrument of war as she sobbed her way through the chilling piece.

“Reclaiming C**t” and “The Woman Who Loved to Make Vaginas Happy” took the show to a whole new level. By the end of “Reclaiming C**t,” freshman Angelique Nolan had half the audience chanting the crude, often derogatory word at the top of their voice as she seductively taught the crowd to reclaim its many facets.

Graduate student Ashlea Morrison traipsed onstage in dominatrix-esque attire and proceeded to explain how she’d discovered a love of making women moan.

The monologue ended with almost the entire cast on stage performing unique moans – Hilary Clinton– “Oh! Oh! Oh-bama!” And Wake Forest – “Mother so dear!”– and culminated with the surprise triple orgasm, performed by Morrison herself.

The final monologue of the evening was specially written for this year’s show and was performed by Graves. “Welcome to the Wetlands” proclaimed that New Orleans is the vagina of America, and that we need only examine her treatment to find out how people feel about vaginas.

New Orleans was of particular importance this year because 90 percent of the proceeds from each performance of the Monologues went to helping alleviate the suffering of the women of New Orleans and the Gulf South.

The remaining 10 percent of the proceeds from the university’s shows went to Family Services, a private, non-profit organization that offers counseling, education and intervention to families in Forsyth County and provides shelter to women and children who are the victims of violence and abuse.